51% of our society's problems (which, rightly or wrongly, we look towards our government for solutions and leadership) cannot be solved by the DoD.
If you want "smaller government", you're going to have to demand a smaller standing army. And a spending cap for the DoD. His wealth isn't just being seized, but squandered.
That's simply not true. The DoD's money doesn't go on salaries for Infantrymen. It doesn't even go on rifles and boots and jeeps.
I'll give you a clue, how many planes do the Taliban have in their Airforce? How much does an F22 cost and how many of them is the USAF buying? What about the Al-Queda Navy, how many aircraft carriers they got? What does a Seawolf-class submarine cost? That's where your taxpayer dollars end up. Soldiers (and Marines) are cheap and if anything we need more of them.
ends up in the hands of the DoD, supporting the war
Not true. It also supports most of the research done in this country.
Either get a smarter foreign policy, or raise taxes to fund our policies
It's amazing how the meaning behind "Supporting the Troops" would change.
I'm curious, what's your source on that. I've heard dozens of statistics on that, all very different, all skewing the data in some way. Some of them only measure discretionary spending, some exclude it, etc.
Measuring discretionary spending isn't skewing the results.
With regard to discretionary spending; there is a difference between including it as part of the US budget and portraying it as the US budget. I only cited is as an example; I make no claims about any particular survey.
Sorry about that, was in a rush. Here's one for total spending:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget,_2...
Here's one for discretionary:
http://www.cdi.org/issues/discret.html
Here's one in relation to GDP, as well as historical discretionary:
http://www.truthandpolitics.org/military-relative-size.php
there is a difference between including it as part of the US budget and portraying it as the US budget
Yes, absolutely. I think one would have to be quite confused about all this to mix up the two. One is what the president proposes and congress debates and votes on. The other is that, plus the laws that have already been passed in the past. The GDP figure is even farther complicated by uncertain estimates.
This might be my bias coming in, but it's pretty clear that if you want to talk about what our elected officials are doing with our money, we have to talk about discretionary spending.